Garcia: An American Life
Page 11
“After we got married, we traded in his old banjo, my dear little rosewood Martin and another guitar, added to the money we’d received for wedding presents and from some wedding gifts we’d returned, and got him the fancy banjo of his dreams—a Weymann from the ’30s with the name ‘John’ inlaid on the peg head. Everybody called the banjo ‘John.’ That banjo had a very distinctive tone; sharp and metallic. We invested in this instrument because it was to be the source of our livelihood, and Jer played that sucker night and day, and got to be very good. He was a very dedicated musician, an aspiring virtuoso. If he couldn’t get in about four hours of practice a day, he’d be in a foul mood.”
Near the end of May 1963 the first Monterey Folk Festival brought together some of the biggest names in folk and traditional country music, as well as numerous local groups, for a weekend of pickin’ and singin’ at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, site of the famous jazz festival (and four years later, the Monterey Pop Festival). The lineup was impressive: Peter, Paul and Mary, the Weavers and the Rooftop Singers were the darlings of the moment in the mainstream folk world; Bob Dylan had still put out only one record, but his reputation was growing by the month. (Sara says she and Jerry walked out of Dylan’s performance at Monterey to protest his use of an amplified acoustic guitar.) Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, perhaps the most revered figures in bluegrass and old-timey, respectively, were on hand. So were three of the best young traditional bands—the New Lost City Ramblers, the Dillards and the Kentucky Colonels. The California bluegrass and string band communities turned out in force to see their heroes, and quite a few Bay Area players had the opportunity to play on smaller stages on the fairgrounds. The Wildwood Boys, with Garcia, Hunter, Nelson and Ken Frankel, won an amateur bluegrass open competition there. Garcia also entered (but didn’t win) a banjo contest that was judged by Doug and Rodney Dillard and the Kentucky Colonels’ banjo ace, Billy Ray Latham.
In the bluegrass community in 1963 the big buzz was about the young Amherst-educated banjo player in Bill Monroe’s band named Bill Keith. The Monroe band played an extended run at the Ash Grove as well as other shows around California around the same time as the festival, so the serious bluegrass fans, like much of Garcia’s Palo Alto crowd, got to check out Keith’s colorful and intricate style on many occasions.
“Garcia reacted to Keith’s playing immediately,” writes Sandy Rothman, one of Garcia’s bandmates in the Black Mountain Boys beginning in late 1963. “It changed his life, as it did for many banjo pickers worldwide, and from that point on I didn’t hear Jerry work as hard on any other banjo technique. With great diligence he set to work mastering the entire fretboard, ‘Keith-style.’ . . . Keith’s banjo approach allowed for dazzling displays of arpeggiated passages that swooped dramatically up the neck like musical parachute jumps.
“Jerry’s playing in the early ’60s might have been described as note-rich, maybe overstated at times, but it was always expressive and full of energy. Any way you looked at it, it was damn fancy banjo picking, consistently well executed. He was admired by progressives and staunch traditionalists alike.”
Eric Thompson, who preceded Rothman as guitarist in the Black Mountain Boys, formed just weeks after the festival, says of Jerry’s banjo playing, “He was pretty good, and inventive, but he didn’t have the sort of perfection that is the norm in that kind of music. Usually, bluegrass music—especially in the banjo playing—tends to be very perfection-oriented because Earl Scruggs was so amazing; he never had a note out of place. It was a very, very high standard. His role in the music never falters. He never plays extraneous notes. You can’t say that about Jerry, but on the other hand, he was very inventive, and that was great.”
* * *
Frank Serratoni stopped renting out rooms in the Chateau in the fall of 1963, so part of the crowd that was living there got together with other friends and moved into a huge turn-of-the-century Victorian in downtown Palo Alto, where Garcia’s recurrent paramour Phoebe Graubard had lived in a room. The two-story house at 436 Hamilton Street (long since demolished) housed David Nelson, Dave Parker, Willy Legate, Bob Hunter and Grace Marie Haddie. Actually, Hunter and Legate lived in a separate barnlike structure that had been divided into lofts, located behind the main house. Not surprisingly, the Hamilton Street house became a new locus of activity for all the residents’ friends.
Garcia spent a lot of time over at Hamilton Street because it was where a lot of his friends were, and because, as Sara noted, he had a difficult time preparing himself psychologically for the birth of his child. This is, after all, a guy who thirty years later told Sara, “I don’t have to grow up and I’m not going to.” So Jerry spent a lot of time away from his pregnant bride, hanging with the boys instead.
At least he was around for the big day when it came. On December 8, 1963, Sara went into labor, and she and Jerry went to Stanford Hospital together. Dave Parker and a couple of other friends went to the hospital to offer Jerry support. “We hung out in the hallways waiting and waiting for however many hours it was, smoking cigarettes and talking,” Parker says. “Then, finally, the baby was born and we got to see it through the window, and then we split and Jerry stayed with Sara for a while. He seemed really happy about being a new father and he and Sara seemed very much in love; it seemed like a good time for them.”
Sara says, “The day Heather was born Jerry stayed with me while I was in labor, which was lovely and nice, and he was there waiting for the news from the delivery room. [Fathers were usually not allowed in the delivery room in this era.] Parker was in the waiting room keeping him company. I remember Jerry skipping down the hall saying, ‘It’s a broad! It’s a broad!’ He was so happy. He’d dreaded having a son. He just didn’t think he’d be able to parent a boy, because he hadn’t really had a father to raise him.
“The next morning I remember waking up and, before I opened my eyes, sensing that someone was sitting next to the bed, and feeling this deep sense of satisfaction that I’d given birth, the baby was healthy, it had been a good, easy birth—hard, but no problems. I felt such a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. And here was my husband sitting next to me, keeping me company. Then I opened my eyes and it was Hunter. I was disappointed, crushed that it wasn’t Jerry. But it was great that there was Hunter. Hunter was a really good friend to me, a constant reliable presence. When I was doing homework, housework, taking care of the baby, he’d come by and just hang out and talk about stuff that was important to me.”
Hunter became baby Heather’s godfather (and he is also godfather to Sara’s son, Julian).
* * *
New Year’s Eve 1963 is a date that holds special significance in Grateful Dead lore because it was on that night that Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir supposedly first talked about playing together in a band. As Weir said, “I was wandering the back streets of Palo Alto with a friend when we heard banjo music coming from the back of the music store. We walked to the door and came in and it was Garcia waiting for his pupils, unmindful that it was New Year’s Eve and that they wouldn’t show up. We sat down and started talking and had a great old rave. I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to form a jug band.”
Garcia and Weir had met before this, but they weren’t exactly friends. Bob was a misfit rich kid five years Garcia’s junior, from nearby Atherton, which Bob once accurately described as “the Bel Air of Northern California” (a reference to the exclusive L.A. suburb). He was born in San Francisco in 1947, and became the second adopted son of a very successful mechanical and electrical engineer who designed heating and cooling systems for big buildings, hotels and factories. Frederick Weir also designed the modern-looking Weir homestead at 89 Tuscaloosa Avenue in Atherton, which was ready for the family in 1950. Bob was a jock growing up, into baseball and track. He had problems in school because he was “dyslexic in the extreme, and nearly functionally illiterate. . . . But they had never heard of dyslexia when I was young so they figured I was lazy, which I was.”
Bob got his first guitar at fourteen as a gift for graduating from junior high school: “It was a pretty miserable guitar, but I learned to play it a little bit,” he said. “The first song I learned to play on it was [the Beach Boys’ version of] ‘Sloop John B.’” Weir was also heavily influenced by Joan Baez, and as he got further into playing he discovered other players and styles. “I started hanging out in the folk scene in Palo Alto,” he said. “Whatever was hot around there, including Jerry, was what caught my attention. There was a guy named Michael Cooney who showed me a lot of stuff. And Jerry, too.”
“His musical leader was Jorma,” Garcia said of Bob in a 1967 interview. “He used to go every time Jorma played, when he played in coffeehouses. Weir would go there with his tape recorder, tape the whole show and talk to Jorma extensively and watch him play the stuff, and study it all and go home and work it out. Jorma is where he learned a lot of his technique. . . . His whole approach to guitar playing was like Jorma’s, essentially.” At this point, Bob was viewed by most of the older pickers as “the kid,” tolerated but not particularly respected.
Weir’s New Year’s Eve tale notwithstanding, it was actually quite a while before the jug band got going beyond a couple of very informal get-togethers. In early 1964, Garcia, Sandy Rothman and David Nelson were still going strong as the Black Mountain Boys, and Jerry and Sandy were hatching a plot whereby they’d travel back East, collect some bluegrass tapes and maybe get themselves hired by Bill Monroe. Their link was to be Neil Rosenberg, of Redwood Canyon Ramblers fame. Rosenberg had managed Bill Monroe’s Indiana music park, the Brown County Jamboree (known far and wide as Bean Blossom) in the summer of 1963, had played banjo for Monroe on occasion and was living in nearby Bloomington.
In February 1964 Rothman wrote a letter to Rosenberg that read, in part, “Jerry Garcia and I, plus his wife and baby may (probably will) have a chance to drive out your way this summer some time after June to hear and tape music and relax. For me, the music and a chance to get unhung-up; for them the trip and bluegrass. If Jerry’s wife does come along, they of course will have to stay in a hotel or the like, and I will probably have no problem finding a place to sleep.”
“We were excited,” Sara says. “To get the opportunity to play with Bill Monroe—that was the pinnacle. The idea was that Jerry was going to play with Bill Monroe, get hired to be in the band. The South was like a foreign country, potentially dangerous. He and Sandy were worried about getting rousted by the rednecks, and rightly so. There was such a strong suspicion of Northerners, and then of weird kids. . . . We thought at first that Heather and I would go along with them, but it didn’t work out. I needed to stay in school to get the hundred dollars a month from my father; it was a little bribe.
“It felt like, ‘This is something hard for us, but it’ll be good for him and then if he gets work, when school is over in June I’ll move there.’ Another plan was I was going to go to school in ethnomusicology. I was the scholar. While he was playing music I could pursue my academic fortune.”
At Stanford, Sara had become a communications major, with a particular interest in film and broadcasting, but, she says, “as with playing an instrument, I got hung up on not being technically proficient, but it was a lively time and I did make a few little films, some using guys like Dave Parker and David Nelson as my actors.” Jerry also performed the soundtrack for a movie that one of the graduate students made about a camp for diabetic children. “That’s a treasure probably nobody even knows about—Jerry playing pretty guitar or banjo music. I can’t remember which.”
Meanwhile, Bob Hunter, David Nelson and Willy Legate were among a large group on the scene who became interested in the Church of Scientology, which in the early ’60s was just beginning to catch on in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. L. Ron Hubbard’s popular book Dianetics had come out in 1950, and in the intervening decade-plus the tenets of Scientology had been codified and a church hierarchy established, in which students of the discipline worked their way up through different courses, or “processes,” on their way to becoming “clear”—supposedly operating at full capacity without being dragged down by their own psychological baggage. Of course, that’s just scratching the surface of what goes on in Scientology—there’s a whole science fiction side involving human mental evolution to a sort of super-being, in control over thousands of years of past lives, and much more.
“I couldn’t figure out what these guys saw in this,” Dave Parker says of his friends. “Intellectual gamesmanship was certainly a key factor—it’s something those guys in particular were really good at. They could do that kind of stuff all day long, and that’s actually a lot of what went on in those houses—verbal fencing with ideas. So I guess it suited them that Scientology was something that was highly complicated and which presented you with this way to confront the world—and ‘confront’ was a word that Scientologists used to use a lot. I thought it was totally odd.”
Willy, Hunter, Nelson and Grace Marie Haddie got into Scientology deeply enough that they moved from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles, in part because more advanced courses were taught at a center there. Whether he was just naturally skeptical or too busy working on his music, Jerry never showed much interest in Scientology: “Jerry would never even have considered distracting himself with someone else’s scam in that way,” Legate says today.
And he certainly wasn’t about to give up smoking pot, which was strictly verboten in the Scientology world. Sara was anti-pot in those days, too, but for another reason: “I was kind of an uptight young mom,” she says. “But the main reason is Jerry got more irresponsible when he was stoned and even less reliable. He wouldn’t show up when he was supposed to or do what he said he was going to do, or the meager paycheck wouldn’t come home when we needed it for rent. If I would show up at Dana Morgan’s on the last day of the week, then I could make sure the check got into the bank. I put on a brave front but I wasn’t having a very good time.”
Shortly before his big trip east with Sandy Rothman, Jerry shaved off his goatee and cut his hair, in part, Sara says, because “he was afraid he’d get bothered by the rednecks with that beard. So I got to see what he really looked like—that was a shock,” she adds with a laugh. Sara’s photo album has a page of pictures of Jerry and Heather outside their little cottage taken on the morning Jerry left on the trip—“a sad day,” Sara says wistfully.
That day, in early May of 1964, Jerry and Sandy hopped into Jerry’s ’61 Corvair (finally—wheels!), went to a Payless store in Palo Alto to buy a case of reel-to-reel tapes and drove down to Los Angeles, where they stayed for a couple of days with Bob Hunter. Hunter recalls that Billy Ray Latham, the hot banjo picker from the Kentucky Colonels, came over one night and jammed with Sandy and Jerry. A day or two later, the Corvair headed out to the San Fernando Valley and linked up with all four members of the Colonels, who were driving east in Roland White’s station wagon to play at the Newport Folk Festival, Cambridge’s Club 47 and various other spots. The Colonels were definitely on a roll at this time—in February they had recorded what remains one of their finest works, a sprightly album of bluegrass instrumentals called Appalachian Swing!
The two cars caravaned east, mainly traveling Route 66, with its truck stops and Burma Shave signs and innumerable small towns. The early part of their route took them through Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Kingman and Amarillo, “where we stopped and went to all the Western shops,” Sandy says. “We mainly slept in the car and ate cheap Mexican food.” They alternated cars a bit, too—Sandy remembers Clarence crammed i
nto the small backseat of the Corvair, and Sandy rode in the Colonels’ station wagon for stretches, too. Jerry mainly drove his Corvair.
They spent endless hours trying to tune in cool radio stations as they roared through town after town, and there was time for some pickin’, too. Rothman says, “We’d pull up at some truck stop with each car going to a different pump, sometimes really far from each other, and we’d agree to play the same tune in each of our cars in hopes of freaking out the guys at the gas station. But nobody ever said a thing. We tried that endlessly and thought it was just so entertaining.”
During their time in the Midwest, Jerry and Sandy spent nearly every waking hour on their bluegrass quest. In Indiana, Rosenberg introduced them to a tape collector (and musician) named Marvin Hedrick, who let them spend untold hours copying reels he’d made at Bean Blossom since the ’50s. On May 24, Rosenberg says, Jerry even recorded a Bill Monroe show himself.
Jerry and Sandy tried to persuade Rosenberg to introduce them to Monroe, but as Rothman recalled, “Neil was steadfast in saying we should talk to him ourselves. I remember as if it was yesterday how we tried to approach Bill, exactly where we stood, and how we posed with our instrument cases upright in front of us, slightly leaning on them, maybe like one of those Stanley Brothers album cover shots. Jerry and I always reminisced about this: How in the world did we think he was going to get our message—mental telepathy? Neither one of us had the courage or the slightest idea, or plan of action, how to tell him we wanted to play with him or ask him for a job. We were petrified. We never said a word.”